Turkey: a recipe for disasterFollow

My knowledge of Turkey extends to a second years university course on the interaction of dar el islam and the west with a major focus on Ataturk and the rise of a secular state as opposed to moves at the same time towards a pan islamic state of a more fundamental nature in other areas. Which is a fancy way of saying `**** all` What I do know is that I did work with a guy from Turkey and the fact that he could grow a beard and no one gave a @#%^ was amazing to him. Which I guess gives an idea of how entrenched some of the anti muslim rules are.

That being said I have no clue about the checks and balances in the Turkish equivalent of the constitution is to maintain secular values so its kind of hard to place judgement on it other than from the view point of a Canadian trying to place his values on a subject he barely understands, which is usually not a bright idea. Anytime you deal with government and religion its tricky ground, even more so with Islam where the two are so entwined, so of course there the chance for fodder for AQ and other fundamentalists and that should be taken into account when making any decision, not to say that it affects the actual decision but rather how it is handled.



Edited, Jul 29th 2008 1:29pm by bodhisattva

Should secular principles trump democracy?

Of course they should. They should, particularly, when the other option is Sharia.

Isn't this a recipe for creating an underground movement of fanatic islamists that would fall perfectly within the AQ narrative?

Not really, it'd be a distinct group of fanatic islamists. AQ hates the Turks almost as much as they hate the Persians.

Interesting times ahead I suppose.

The military could easily enough stage a coup, they could use the old "Kurdish terrorists" excuse. A couple of more bombs like that recent one and it could happen very soon.

In my point of view secular principles always trump religious ones. The question ofcourse would be how long they can hold out against democracy.



Meh, those exist anyway, I doubt many will join this merely because they tried to ban the AKP.

So what if a democratic decision turned a democratic state into a theocratic one?

It depends what you mean by "theocratic". But if the democratic safeguards are in place, if elections are held freely, fairly and regularly, opposition parties are allowed, etc... Then why not?



It depends how you define "pure democracy". Switzerland is as close as it gets I think, and if it wasn't for the fact that they're a bunch of racist and xenophobic twats, it would work pretty well.

I agree that there are "fundemantal" laws that should always exist: no torture, rule of law, respect for democratic principles, etc... But I don't think secularism should necessarily be one of those. The AK party in Turkey is not very different from the Christian-Democrats in Germany, for exemple. Except its Islam instead of Christianity. But if it can be shown to work, then all the better.

Well, that's exactly the problem with it.

Saw the Edit a bit late.

True, but is allowing headscarf in Universities against "secularism"? It's arguable.

Can it be proved that it's part of a plan to turn Turkey into an Islamic state? The judges clearly didn't think so. Keeping in mind that the Court is filled with appointees of the (fiercly secular) Generals, it's a heavy blow for the Generals.

Yeah, in France it's prohibited so as to prevent prosyletism. They argue that "ostentatious religious signs" (such as the headscarf) could pressure other people into being converted. That's the official explanation.

The real one is of course that secularism is a good test as to whether people want to "integrate" themselves in France. Recently, the highest court refused to grant French nationality to a Moroccan woman because she wore a burkha, and that such a dress-sense was "contrary to French values and principles".